The Power and the Glory
by Cygna-hime
Summary: A brief history of House Solidor: as Gramis found it, as he changed it, and as he left it to his sons.
1. Gramis

The birth of Gramis Gana Solidor was an occasion of some importance: his brother Ceraano, sole heir of House Solidor, had been sickly since birth, and every month his doctors were surprised to hear that he yet lived. Over the Emperor's head hung a specter of a house fallen, an ignoble end for generations of might. Certain noble lords whose families held power in the Senate began to smile when they spoke of the future. Gramis's birth took the smiles from their faces. House Solidor would endure.

By the time Gramis was seven, four attempts on his life had been thwarted by luck and skilled guards. With his every breath he learned that the very men who smiled at him at parties would kill him if they could. He never forgot it.

The dearest friend of his boyhood was Zerides Bunansa, second son of a third son who had never been ambitious. House Bunansa was far larger in number than House Solidor, being without such strong motivation as the Imperium for younger sons to fight their brothers. Zerides' father and brother were investigated thoroughly and found as safe as cautious parents could hope. The friendship of the two children was not nearly as safe: they spent most of their times sneaking into and out of places they were not supposed to be.

The Judge, a man in his middle years called Dorian, of House Zargabaath, who had been assigned to guard young Gramis soon discovered that it was pointless even to try keeping him in his bed after dark. Trying only drove him to be stealthier and harder to watch. Instead, he verified the loyalty of the night guard a thousand times and worried. When nothing happened, he almost convinced himself that nothing ever would.

When Gramis was fourteen, his brother came of age, and the hopeful lords at last had to accept that Ceraano, for all that he still looked like a stiff wind would blow him away, was tougher than he appeared, and it would take more than nature could provide to remove him. The assassins started coming, along with more subtle attempts to encourage him to overstep his authority. In that they failed; Ceraano was not one to defy his father's rule, even in seeming. He was not confident enough for that.

Even without confidence, he was a good strategist, and the constant border scuffles failed to do better than illness and ill-will had done. With his military success came a measure of pride; Ceraano began to carry himself like the crown prince he was.

Still, Gramis knew that his brother would not make a good emperor. For years he had been exposed little to the society of his future subjects, and many lessons Gramis had been taught in childhood Ceraano had never learned. He was sixteen, and only now was he coming to know the lords of Archadia. Knowing him for a threat, they dissembled before him more than before the child of five Gramis had been when he had met them. Ceraano had never discovered whom to trust how far. Gramis knew more about his brother's friends than he did himself, and what he knew was far from encouraging.

It would be a divided Archadia that Ceraano would rule, an Archadia torn between the Senate and the Emperor's favorites. Gramis was fifteen when he vowed not to allow such a thing to be. The Empire was his soul and his world. He would protect it.

He came of age the next year, a thin boy whose face was still a mass of unexpected angles. Amid fanfare and intrigue, Gramis Solidor became a man.

Ceraano did not seem even to notice that the brother of whom he had always been fond was old enough to threaten his tenuous position. If he did, he ignored it. He was too quick to befriend and too slow to think ill of a friend; Gramis had been a bright spot on his bedridden youth, next only to the books he loved best of all, and the love for the boy was easily transferred to the man.

The one effect of Gramis's majority on his brother, as far as anyone could tell, was that he was expected to be betrothed as soon as possible. Accordingly, he spent the winter involved in negotiating his engagement to Khalia Margrace, a cousin of the Rozarrian Emperor. The alliance was viewed by its architects as a hopeful sign, a token of friendly feeling. Still, Khalia was not a princess, the Archadian court noted. The offer was good, but not foolishly so: it would not give Archadia a foothold in the Rozarrian imperial succession.

Many at court, Senators and Judges both, supported closer ties with Rozarria, but as many did not. Naturally, they gravitated to Gramis, who gave them every hope that he was sympathetic to the need for Archadia to be visibly stronger than its great rival. In fact, he had no opinion on the subject, but, seeing that it could gain or lose him his first core of supporters, he swiftly acquired one. Archadia was her own strength; she needed no other.

If Ceraano was blind to the rising faction, his hangers-on were not: Gramis continued dodging assassins and refusing to impinge on his father's Imperial power. He knew that he would not succeed: if nothing else, Teren Bocinger, Ceraano's chief hanger-on, would expose his treachery as soon as he said or did anything incriminating. He neatly avoided all the traps laid so carefully before his feet and took a certain pleasure in catching the plotters in their own plots. He convinced his father to raise his old ally and bodyguard Dorian Zargabaath to the rank of Judge Magister when a position fell vacant by his efforts. It was such a pity that Judge Magister Orieth Bocinger had approached Judge Zargabaath for help in a plot against the Emperor, but it just went to show that _faithful_ service should be rewarded.

Ceraano did have some skill in improving the Empire: he put into effect modifications to the roads based on descriptions of Galtean Era transportation which he had read. He also began entangling some of the problems of the intricate justice system, working with a diligence and attention to detail even his enemies admired. Gramis wished a thousand times that he had been the elder brother and Ceraano the younger. They might have been the first Solidor brothers in generations to refrain from the power struggles that had dwindled their house. Ceraano had been born to be a scholar and administrator, as Gramis had been born to be a leader and politician. What allies they could have been, if Fate or Fortune had been kinder!

But Ceraano was older, and no wishes could change that. Gramis left his dreams for sleeping and set out to do what he had to do for the good of the realm.

Teren Bocinger was becoming restless. He was a handsome, charming man whose clever tongue had won the Crown Prince's friendship, but his ambition did not stop at being advisor to an emperor. His mother was the older sister of the Emperor, and from her Teren had inherited a very Solidor will to power and lack of scruple. He wanted to rule. It meant nothing to him that he would be very bad at it, even worse than Ceraano. He just wanted it. This could not be allowed.

Gramis made himself act friendlier toward his cousin, pretending that his dislike was softening. In fact, he despised Teren more than ever. The man had neither convictions nor scruples, a hedonistic egotist of the worst variety. Ceraano had been a true and generous friend to him, and he was ready to betray that trust for advancement elsewhere.

Of course, so was Gramis.

He hated himself for what he was about to do. All his life he had believed in keeping faith with those who kept faith with him, and now he was preparing to go against that belief to destroy the brother he loved. But more than family Gramis loved Archadia. He would do this, and worse, to keep her strong.

He held out the hand of friendship to Teren, who grasped at it greedily. In private, Gramis confided in him, saying that as much as he thought he deserved the throne, he cared too much for Ceraano to take action against him. He told Teren this, he said, because he thought Teren could _understand_, being Ceraano's dearest friend, and half a Solidor as well. It was a great pity that Teren was not in Ceraano's place, he said, because Gramis could have trusted _him_ to use the Imperium wisely. Unhappily, it seemed that they all took after their mothers more than their fathers.

Such flattery was ridiculous, but though it made Gramis nearly ill to say it, Teren was eager to think himself more imperial than he was. With a few tokens of esteem from Gramis, he convinced himself that Ceraano needed to be put out of the way to clear a path for Teren's own bid for power.

Gramis's one consolation for what he had wrought was that Ceraano died in his sleep, without pain.

Evidence had of course been faked to incriminate an old Senator who had opposed Teren's ascendancy over the imperial family. Unfortunately for Teren, he had relied on Gramis's connections among the Judges to conceal the inconsistencies in the evidence. Instead, they pulled the shoddy lie to pieces. Once found, the assassin was more than willing to name his employer in exchange for clemency, and Teren, Duke of Mirmeleh, was executed for treason.

Gramis wept openly at his brother's funeral. "Entite's tears," many said, but he truly missed his brother, who had trusted him and whom he had betrayed. He would mourn his death for as long as he lived.

Although he mourned in private, in public there was work to do. He was twenty years old and sole heir to the Archadian Empire. He had much to do to gain power while his father was yet strong enough to have no fear of a coup. He would never challenge his father for power, but many would wish him to. He wanted to be strong enough to refuse them, and to do that, there were many things to be done.

For one thing, he had to marry. The customary five-year betrothal period over, Ceraano was to have married Khalia Margrace in the spring. With his death the contract would ordinarily have passed to Gramis. But he had his supporters to think of, who had joined him and stayed with him on the conviction that he would remain distant from Rozarria, and he kept his promises.

By good luck or good planning, those same supporters had persuaded the Emperor that marrying his only son to a Rozarrian would be unpopular with the people, who wanted their rulers to be all Archadian. Therefore Gramis watched his father seal the letter that contained his most polite regrets along with an excellent counter-offer: if Rozarria and House Margrace would swallow the insult, he was willing that Asseline Fidelia Solidor, his only daughter, should marry Al-Malik Margrace, brother of the scorned Khalia.

The offer was made under gentle pressure from Asseline and accepted under equal but less gentle pressure from Al-Malik. Gramis gave his sister a rich present of jewelry in thanks, to which she responded with an equal gift of a fine ceremonial sword, in token of her own gratitude. The melancholy of her company for the next five years was a small price to pay for all that he gained thereby.

As a reward for the support of his allies, Gramis requested and received a betrothal to the daughter of an Archadian noble house.


	2. Strella

_Disclaimer: The universe and some of the characters belong to Squenix. The rest are mine._

Strella Annonice Lunoridas was the granddaughter of Senate Chairman Reinardt Lunoridas, patriarch of the second family of Archadia. The wealth and power of House Lunoridas was second only to that of House Solidor: under Reinardt's leadership the Senate posed a constant challenge to the power of the Emperor. Marrying his son to Reinardt's favorite granddaughter would be a blow to the Senate's power, if it could be done, for the Chairman would never consent. It would show how little House Solidor had to care for his wishes.

In Gramis's favor were two facts: first, Strella was being toasted as the most beautiful maiden in Archadia, not suitable for just anyone to wed, but she could scarcely do better than the Solidor heir; second, her father was Reinardt's third and least favorite son, who would defy his father the instant he ordered, in his usual high-handed way, that such a marriage was not to be thought of.

The Emperor knew these useful facts as well as his son, and accordingly he sent his initial proposal directly and solely to Grendil, Count of Gracht. When Reinardt heard that negotiations for dowry had been opened without consulting him, he recognized it for the deliberate snub it was and instructed Grendil to terminate the negotiations immediately. Gramis gathered through the ever-present servant grapevine that Grendil's reply had been a loud, heartfelt declaration that he was a grown man who could betroth his daughter without the consent of any interfering old man, head of the family or not. The contract was signed with unusual haste, and all high society noted that Chairman Reinardt was no longer speaking to his third son.

The other families of Senatorial rank had as good sources of information as Gramis had. When the engagement was announced, they all knew that Reinardt's power did not suffice even to control his family. By the time Gramis married Strella, Reinardt was no longer Chairman of the Senate.

Strella was four years Gramis's junior, a fair woman who seemed to have stepped from a classical painting, all golden hair, green eyes, serene smile, and curved, creamy limbs. Her passive loveliness stirred not a chord in Gramis, who found animation more attractive than mere even features. Still, he recognized that she was beautiful. Entering the finest of parties together, he took pride in the knowledge that all men envied him possession of the woman on his arm.

It was axiomatic that one could have either brains or beauty, but not both, and Strella did little to disprove the saying. She was decidedly not a clever woman; Gramis soon gave up on his dream of finding a confidante in her. Her political knowledge was as good as necessary, but no better: she could be trusted to arrange seating at dinner parties without placing mortal enemies together, she knew the rules of precedence for all Ivalice, she could recall fifty years of intermarriages for all the old Gentry and most of the new, she could make polite conversation without offending anyone, and she knew what must never be said before whom, but she had not the slightest notion of how she might go about turning her knowledge into influence.

To her credit, she never tried. For someone with such august parentage (her mother was a Bergan), she was singularly lacking in ambition. Possibly, her husband thought, unfamiliar with anyone who did not desire power, she was just intelligent enough to realize that she could get very little more by intrigue than she already had to look forward to. Unless Gramis did something spectacularly stupid ,such as lose the support of the Ministry of Law, Strella would be Empress one day. There was no higher office anywhere.

When approached, as was inevitable, by enemies of House Solidor, Strella was sensible enough to tell her husband what he already knew. Eventually, they realized that her loyalties were to her husband's faction rather than her grandfather's and her uncle's after him, and they gave up trying so obviously.

One who did not recognize her new loyalty until too late was her cousin, Rudolf Zenda Lunoridas, whose father had taken the Senate seat reserved for House Lunoridas after Reinardt's little-lamented decease. He appealed to their shared childhood and mutual affection rather than to their common blood, for he had always meant to marry his pretty cousin and refused to believe that she might be happy with Gramis. Through wishful thinking to himself and winning words to her, he managed to convince himself that she would marry him if Gramis died and left House Solidor's power in ruins.

Strella half believed it herself. She had always been mildly in love with Rudolf, as she was not in the least with Gramis, whom she regarded even after six months of marriage rather as she would a Coeurl who had taken up residence in her house: affectionate enough as long as he was well-behaved, but always very much aware that one day he might not be. She knew, or thought she knew, that Rudolf would never harm her. So she did not discourage his first flirtations as she had those who had hoped for more with less cause.

When he pressed a vial with the outward appearance of a potion into her hand along with the whispered instruction to slip it into Gramis's wine, Strella reached her sticking point. She might not be very fond of her husband, but she drew the line at killing him.

Rather than doing anything herself, she gripped the vial in one hand and her nerve in the other and asked to speak with Gramis privately after dinner. She would have to face the Coeurl in her parlor sooner or later, and she preferred to do so in her house, on her terms. Strella was not a clever woman, but no more was she a craven one.

To her surprise, Gramis did not grow angry with her. On the contrary, he thanked her for her loyalty with unusual gentleness and arranged without being asked that she relate the details only once, to Judge Magister Zargabaath who could be trusted not to reveal her indiscretion. The poison was easily traced to Rudolf; overconfident in his accomplice, he had not troubled to cover his tracks. The rest was a foregone conclusion. Gramis did call in one favor: at the execution, Rudolf was silenced to prevent him spreading to all of Archades assembled the vitriol which had poured forth when he had been presented with the unpalatable fact that Strella had loved the honor of her wedding vows more than him. The executioner's sword made her secret safe forever.

Afterward, Strella became somewhat easier with her husband. Paradoxically, having come so close to awakening his ire, she knew how much kinder he was than she had thought, and she no longer feared him.

They would never be close: Gramis was constantly busy with political machinations or absent weeks at a time on diplomatic visits, while Strella was uninterested in the administration of the realm and found her life full enough with social obligations. Still, she was nice to come home to, calm and capable of sympathy even without understanding. Their lives were largely separate, but they were happy enough so. It could have been much worse.

Strella was never suspected of infidelity by Archadian society, except in the general way that no woman of such remarkable beauty with such a frequently-absent husband could avoid. Certainly she never showed favor to any of the men who still flocked around her. Her husband never doubted her loyalty, either, which was all to the good, as Gramis had no desire to make a fool of himself by playing the cuckold. What was a greater compliment, he never doubted her discretion, either. She took great care, after her near escape from scandal or worse, to avoid even the appearance of wrongdoing. Naturally a faithful woman, the incident rid her permanently of any romantic longings her girlhood daydreams had created. She never, then or later, gave her husband cause for jealousy or distrust.

Still, it was just as well that Rudolf Lunoridas had been a year and a half in his traitor's grave before Strella bore Gramis their first child.


	3. Zulia

_Disclaimer: The world is not mine; I'm just borrowing it. Original characters, however, are mine._

Zulia Dwardo Solidor was from the first a source of anxiety. With his birth, Gramis had an heir, and he worried that Zulia would be as ill-suited for the role as his own brother had been. With his birth, Strella was a mother, fully sundered from the life she had known before her marriage and required to behave in a wholly different manner. With his birth, the Emperor had a grandson, an alternative heir.

Gramis was still a young man; even his father was scarcely past middle age. If they both survived as long as their predecessors, defying the wishes of their peers in favor of a vigorous old age, no one alive would see the end of the Solidor Emperors. With Zulia, Gramis's death would not suffice to change that. He was a threat merely by existing.

Zulia's first wet-nurse was discovered smearing her breasts with poison; no fewer than three guards were caught forcing the door of the day-nursery; one of the pair of Judges overseeing the infant's security was found by the other sabotaging the efficacy of the patrols in that wing of the palace. Gramis began to grow vexed.

Interrogation produced the names of those who had orchestrated the attempts. Gramis failed to be surprised by them: Bergan, Lunoridas, Bocinger. All had been problematic in the past, but he would not have them so in the future.

Given a free hand by his father, he took what revenge he deemed appropriate. For his wife's contentment and his own pride, he was merciful with House Lunoridas: it would take a century, but they would, in time, regain the wealth lost to Imperial taxation and become once more the second house of Archadia. House Bergan lost most of its political appointees, whether implicated or not, and the ensuing rage of the comparatively innocent split the family in two, neither half capable of much action. As for House Bocinger, for its constant attempts at the Imperium it was reduced by taxation and dismissal to the lowest of the Gentry, without a single office or command position to its name. The Senator of that House was implicated in that plot and so many others that his seat was taken from his family for ninety years and nine by the vote of the Senate. They did not appreciate behavior that could incite such a response from the ever-merciful Gramis Solidor.

Zulia's childhood was much more peaceful thereafter. Having seen how Gramis reacted to threats to his kin, nobody wanted theirs to be the next House suffering from Imperial wrath.

Despite everything, Gramis did not love his son, nor Zulia his father. They did not hate one another: at worst, they were indifferent; at best, they wished not to be. Nevertheless, the fact remained that there was little affection between them and, worse, no understanding.

In infancy, Zulia was much as all babies everywhere. He took after his mother (fortunately, said malicious and unfounded gossip), being fair and round-faced. Gramis was fond of him then, when he could spare a thought from the Empire, and Strella doted on him in her spare hours.

The difficulty arose later, when Zulia demonstrated in his adolescence that he had inherited much of his mother's temperament as well as her looks. Gramis had a very firm idea of what an Imperial heir should be, and Zulia was most emphatically not it. Like Strella, he was good-natured, though unlike Strella he was sober and serious; like her, too, he had a great facility in recalling information and a great difficulty in putting it to use.

When he came of age, Gramis employed him in the capacity of organizer of information, to which work he was admirably suited. But what, Gramis asked himself, would become of Zulia when he had to act on this information on his own? It would not do to wrap him in velvet. He would have to be given a chance to succeed, or fail, at politics while there was still an alternative.

This suited Zulia admirably. Since his adolescence, he had been chafing at the tight rein kept on him, growing angrier as the passing years indicated that his father did not trust his judgment. He was not quite the fool Gramis thought him, though their methods were different enough to make each seem a fool to the other.

He won friends through his polite attention and allies through his sober sense. He could carry in mind information from across Ivalice, piecing it together into a single image. He was conventional, he was stable, and he gained influence on those grounds. More than a few of his peers had seen too many attempted coups to have felt comfortable with a more impetuous man.

For himself, he wanted only to maintain his dignity, his family's, and his country's, so long as they were in his care. Dignity was Zulia's foremost concern, not the new, haughty quality but the older, more somber one, which chiefly consisted of maintaining a good reputation through deeds worthy of his name. In many ways, Zulia was old before he was a man.

Of course, he was enough his father's son to have very clear plans as to the course Archadia would follow under his rule. He planned to open her society to the best of the newly-conquered peoples, erasing once and for all the division between Empire and colony. The ceaseless expansion would stop, and the resources needed for war would be free to turn inward, to Archadia herself. He would make Archadia the noble lady in the court of nations he had always known her to be.

His position was its own weakness. The generals did not wish their armies to disband, losing power thereby, and the Senate, though inclined to his course, would not support a self-governing Solidor. Zulia gained few allies by his ideals. Yet a few did fall in with him, for the most part sons of old Gentry who preferred Zulia to Gramis, whose rule they were coming to know.

He was their hope, who was their greatest fear. On the one hand, he was a Solidor, ruthless, intelligent, and independent as all his family; on the other, he was the conservative son of a progressive man whom many of them hated for his progression. If anyone were to remove Gramis without a costly civil war, it would be Zulia. Many men of his age, long resigned to the Imperial system which was the only one they had ever known, preferred the stability he promised to the uncertainty of reviving the long-dead Republic of Archadia. They had never lived under such a system and therefore feared it.

Zulia did not reject the friendships these men offered, for he could ill afford to turn them away, but he refrained from speaking a word against his father. Though the two men did not and would never like one another, they met, when Zulia had proved himself competent to the task before him, on terms of mutual respect: Zulia recognized Gramis's unswerving devotion to the good of the realm, while Gramis at last acknowledged that he had an heir worthy of the name. Besides, Zulia held for his father a strange devotion, the more powerful for never being expressed.

He would have loved his father, if he could. But Zulia knew always that he was in Gramis's eyes an heir, not a child. Perhaps because Gramis was not naturally demonstrative in his affections, perhaps because he had never been close to his own father, perhaps because Zulia's childhood had come when Gramis was most occupied with consolidating power; whatever the reason, they never met on a closer footing than as colleagues. Zulia's love for the man who could have been his hero was stillborn, made bitter and harsh with suppression. Respect could cover that lack of affection, but it could not replace it.

Besides, Zulia knew he was not Gramis's favorite son. That was his brother.


	4. Ceraano

_Disclaimer: The world is not mine, although many of the characters and all the words are._

Ceraano Pollias Solidor was born the son of the fourth Emperor of Archadia. His birth followed by six months his grandfather's death, caused by a plague he had contracted on a state visit to one of the new colonies. No one had suspected that he was ill, so strong was his self-mastery and so firm his resolve to cause no worry, until the disease was too far advanced for even the best in the realm to cure.

Common gossip held that it was coincidence that Gramis's second son had been born eight months after that fatal visit. It seemed to them a sign that the new Emperor (for Gramis had established his rule immediately) had been aware that Archadia would soon be in want of a second heir. They whispered of secret experiments in the Draklor Laboratory under Gramis's direction, experiments which had produced a poison capable of imitating plague.

These gossips were entirely wrong: Gramis had had nothing to do with his father's death, nor, as all the researchers at Draklor, feeling their autonomy threatened, were quick to disclaim, did he have the authority to direct that or any other experiment there. He accepted the whispers as the inevitable consequence of coming into his inheritance sooner than expected.

For the next several years, Gramis had much work to do in order to transfer all the functions of Archadia's government to his control as they had been under his father's. He therefore saw little of his second son until the boy was nearly four years old.

By that time, Ceraano had become quite definitely a person rather than a mere infant. His eyes were as dark as his father's and as merry as his mother's, and his small nose showed every sign of developing into the traditional Solidor beak. To Gramis, Ceraano looked the very image of his uncle and namesake, whose name he had been given out of a sentimental wish that Ceraano have a chance to be the second son he should always have been. That wish was the only visible sign that Gramis's thoughts immediately after his father's death turned often on the past.

The resemblance grew more marked with time, and it was not only physical. When Ceraano was ten, he had expressed to his brother, then fourteen, the desire to become a scholar. Gramis encouraged him in this choice, the more gladly because it was unlikely to bring him into conflict with Zulia. Accordingly, Ceraano immersed himself in histories, plays, and records of the thousand and one affairs of Archadia's long past.

He made himself at home there to such a degree that most of Archades, including his mother, scarcely recalled his existence three days out of four. What friends he had were mostly students like himself, interested in history, magick, or literature: younger sons, all. Heirs had no time for such impractical pastimes.

Zulia resigned himself easily to his brother's eccentricity. He was acutely aware that, much as he might occasionally wish for a brother with his head less permanently in the past, it would have been ill for him had Ceraano been interested in politics. Since he had no need to fear his brother, he was free to like him when circumstances reminded him that he had a brother. As with Ceraano and most of those bound to the present, they were ever distant, but none the less fond for that.

The affection betweeen them delighted Gramis, who had feared that the constantly shifting pressures of lords and land would set them at odds. It was one of his private dreams to see his sons remain all their lives at peace with one another and bring new life to their ravaged House. He was glad of his chosen wife on that account, for certainly Ceraano had not inherited his love of peace from his father. He was glad too of Zulia, sensible enough not to see a threat where none existed. Most of all, though, he was glad of Ceraano, whom he loved as his lost brother made flesh once more.

As much as Gramis wished it, Ceraano was far from a replica of his dead uncle. He was more easy in his rank than the elder Ceraano had ever been and less easy in his trust. His genuine indifference to hunting, drinking, and the other amusements popular among the young nobility made him a difficult target for the silver-tongued wastrels who could speak of little else. His friends, few though they were, were true.

While studying history with a group of other noble scholars, Ceraano befriended and was befriended by a boy roughly his own age, Quinas Bunansa, whose father, Zerides, had once been Gramis's dearest friend, before adult interests had driven them apart. The sons grew closer far than ever the fathers had been, until anyone looking for Ceraano was advised to first seek Quinas, who was the more noticeable and memorable of the two.

Unlike their fathers, Quinas and Ceraano showed no signs of growing apart upon coming of age and being compelled to take some sort of place in society. Quite the reverse, in fact; ladies planning the small, intellectual gatherings common among the Gentry of that period soon learned that an invitation sent only to one of the pair was an invitation wasted, so close in affection were they. Most of the social occasions Ceraano attended were on the strength of that affection, for Quinas both enjoyed them and was popular at them, having received at birth a full allowance of the famous Bunansa wit. Ceraano, perseverant hostesses discovered, could be induced to be nearly as quick of tongue when he was at ease in the company, and the friends' verbal spars provided much enjoyment for the literary elite of Archades.

Ceraano was comfortable in the role of younger son, especially as his brother had been betrothed since the age of nineteen to a daughter of House Zecht who was, if not so well-born as some women Zulia might have had, every inch the dignified, noble lady Zulia dreamt of. Ceraano had every expectation of remaining the alternative heir for the rest of his life, with access to the Imperial Library and all else a scholar might want.

By this it may be seen that Ceraano had inherited not only his mother's gentle smile but also her lack of ambition. Not for him were throne and crown trophies worth murdering for; he preferred knowledge to power and his relatively unfettered life to the regulated one of an Emperor. He knew enough of the responsibility his father shouldered to know that he was ill-suited to it, and his conversations with Zulia were enough to affirm him in his belief that the world of political machination was not for him, nor he for it.

He loved and respected his father for what Gramis capably did each day to keep the ever-expanding Empire on an even keel. The affection between them was the stronger because they were so different: Gramis had the kind of personality that appeared to best advantage if not required to compete with others of a similar type, which Ceraano emphatically was not. Moreover, their daily lives were so disparate that neither ever encroached on the other's beloved sphere. To Ceraano, speaking with his father was speaking with history as it came into being; to Gramis, speaking with his son was speaking with the past, with the brother whose death he regretted as nothing else in life.

He had the love of his father, the trust of his brother, the respect of his colleagues, the comradeship of his friend, and the future of his dreams: what more had Ceraano to desire in life?

According to his mother, he needed a wife, in case Zulia should have no sons. Ceraano did not agree, but he appeared when required at his mother's parties, though they were larger and, to him, duller than those of his accustomed circle. He and Quinas laughed together over their parents' variously subtle stratagems to introduce them to "suitable" maidens. Despite Strella's best efforts, no engagement, nor promise of one, was forthcoming. Gramis, who knew full well that Ceraano had as yet no wish to marry and would deny him nothing if it did no one harm, refrained from involvement. He believed that time would do what demands would not. All the same, unwed, intellectual young ladies began conversations with Ceraano at his own preferred gatherings with ever greater regularity. They, too, recognized that he was a Solidor, and that a life with a scholar was one of the best open to them.

This dance had been going on for a year and a half when everything changed.


End file.
